Ashley St Clair, a former conservative influencer who has both admired and shared a bed with Elon Musk, offers the documentary's most economical verdict: "Elon is a nuke." It is the kind of line that filmmaker Alex Gibney could never have scripted, which is perhaps why he chose to build an entire four-hour film around witnesses of exactly this calibre — people who have orbited the world's richest man closely enough to feel the heat. Gibney's portrait is as sprawling as Musk's own empire, which now encompasses Tesla electric cars, SpaceX rockets, Starlink satellites upon which several nations' militaries have grown dangerously dependent, X — the platform formerly known as Twitter, which has become a vast amplifier of grievance culture — and Grok AI, whose server farms are said to consume extraordinary quantities of fresh water each day. The film does not flinch from the contradictions embedded in this accumulation of power.

When Musk led Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he reportedly fired thousands of tax-collection officers, a decision that, far from saving public money, is believed to have widened the very deficit it promised to shrink. Among the film's most affecting voices is Justine Musk, née Wilson, Elon's first wife, who speaks with both intelligence and raw candour about the death of one of their infant children and the particular loneliness of grief beside a man constitutionally incapable of quiet. Errol Musk, Elon's formidably opinionated father, charts the formative pressures of an apartheid-era South African childhood in which his son was bullied and physically beaten. Gibney reaches, wittily, for H.

G. Wells: the 1936 film adaptation of *The Man Who Could Work Miracles*, in which bored cosmic beings bestow supernatural power upon an utterly ordinary earthling.